


Precious Little Lad

by dilangley



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Even when they don't, Gen, Jack the Ripper DLC, Pre-Jack the Ripper DLC, The Frye Twins get each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:54:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24607285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilangley/pseuds/dilangley
Summary: Jacob takes on an orphan from Lambeth Asylum. Evie's skepticism is understandable.
Relationships: Evie Frye & Jacob Frye, Jacob Frye & Jack the Ripper
Comments: 2
Kudos: 24





	Precious Little Lad

_ The boy shivers in the corner. _

_ Jacob Frye unlocks the door and opens it slowly, waiting for him to look up and make eye contact, but the child remains blank. _

_ “I’m…” Jacob begins, but he swallows and starts over. “You’re going to be okay.” _

_ The boy does not move. _

_ Lambeth Asylum is a pox on London, a predator of the worst order. In one ward, a kindly nurse will offer hot broth to a sick child. In another, a gruesome doctor will spill living brains on the floor. The poor have no better option than to take their chances here. _

_ “Let’s get you out of here,” Jacob says. Now the boy looks up. His eyes are blue as the sky on the brightest of days. “I’ll get you to your home.” _

_ This time, the boy convulses, the tremble beginning at his hands and rippling down his body. “No.” _

_ Jacob skips the questions bubbling to his lips. _

_ “Just out then.”  _

_ The boy agrees. _

  
  
  


“You have lost what you had of a mind. Of all the harebrained, half-cocked ideas…” Evie Frye wore her most maternal, most disapproving grimace, and nothing could make her brother grin more. 

“Careful. You’ll hurt my feelings,” Jacob said. 

She ignored him to begin her list. If there was one thing he knew, it was that Evie could formulate a set of cons the instant he came up with an idea. The trait might have been endearing if it weren’t so damn irritating.

“You sleep on a train,” she said.

“Well, we haven’t all got us a nice fella with his own flat.”

“You’re responsible for a gang barely teetering on the edge of respectability.”

“The Rooks are just fine, thank you very much.” He picked up a stray newspaper, opened it, and kicked his legs up across the couch. It was performative nonchalance though. In fact, he cared very much about Evie’s opinion. If she said he was not capable of it, then he had to believe that.

The antagonism melted out of her voice into something softer.

“You’re going to be the only Master Assassin in London soon,” she said.

Now there was the simple reality he did not much want to think about. No date was set, but Evie had begun putting her affairs in order. 

He did not acknowledge her implication; she wasn’t the only twin one who had perfected the art of ignoring.

“Father was an assassin and a school teacher and still found time to raise us. I’d say we turned out just fine.”

They stared at each other, and he recognized his responsibility to break the stalemate. Of course, Evie would not simply understand. He had hooked the train on its course through London proper, burst into the common area, and announced he was taking on a kid full-time. It must seem a lark or bit of lunacy to her.

She hadn’t met the boy yet, seen his haunted little eyes and his shaky little hands. 

Evie also hadn’t been the one to liberate the factories of London where grown men had children work their hands to the bone for pennies. After the first time he had seen it for himself, Jacob had been the one to take on that grim work. His childhood had been happy, even his adolescence had been larking and gambling. But in the factories of London, Jacob had first realized what a gift that carefree life had been, one denied to many.

Maybe finding this child rotting in Lambeth Asylum, homeless and scared, was his chance to give that gift to someone else.

“I couldn’t leave him behind, Evie. You’ll understand when you meet him. I don’t have a choice.”

“We could find him a nice…” She stopped, tilted her head to the side. She sighed. “Where is he now?”

“I left him with Agnes. In a pub.”

Jacob admired how Evie refrained from comment.

  
  
  


“Says his name’s Jack, precious lad.” 

Jacob gaped at Agnes, beer in hand, patting the boy on the shoulder as he heartily tucked into a bowl of oatmeal. The pub’s midday slump meant the slurp of the lad’s poor table manners was the only sound.

“Does he now?” Jacob tried not to be offended. He had coaxed the ghost out of Lambeth, bought him a coat off one of Clara’s kids, and offered him food more than once. Jack, as he was apparently called, hadn’t said a word since that sharp, desperate no in the asylum.

“Not that he says much else,” Agnes amended.

Evie pressed her hand against Jacob’s arm, a soft approval without words, before taking a seat at the table.

“Jack is a good English name. I’m Evie Frye, and this is my brother, Jacob. I think you know him already.”

Jack looked up at her expectantly.

“Jacob tells me you don’t want to go home, but he cannot promise you that unless he knows more. Unless he knows where home is.”

Jack shuddered and shook his head. 

“We have to know or we’ll have to turn you over the authorities.”

Jacob tempered his desire to tell Evie to stop, to back off with such flagrant lies. If anything, they would put him in the frighteningly capable hands of Clara O’Dea. 

“31 East Sussex Street,” Jack mumbled. 

“Alright then. Thank you,” Evie said. She looked up at Jacob, and he nodded. He didn’t need to ask the Rooks for that street address. It was right here in Whitechapel. 

“Let’s go.”

  
  
  
  
  


The little slat house had likely never seen better days. It had the shoddy construction rampant in this part of the city, one of the many buildings erected just to fall down around their overpaying tenants. Jacob knocked at the door as Evie stood behind him. She often did that, waited just there, a corporeal shadow who always had his back. 

A wave of unexpected grief hit him again at the thought of losing her to India, to a land completely foreign to him. 

A woman opened the door of the home and squinted into the sun. “Can I help you?”

“Perhaps, ma’am. I’m wondering if…” He stopped mid-sentence when he saw a familiar blot inside the entryway. One cannot work in assassination and not recognize the tell-tale rusty brown of a bloodstain. He adjusted. “I’m wondering if you knew the previous residents of this house.”

“Knew them? Dear me, not at all. Terrible story though. If I’da better option, I wouldn’t be here ‘cause I’m like to face a haunting.” Her tone did not match her words. In fact, her eyes lit up a little, her mouth rounded out each syllable with relish.

Evie spoke next. “What happened to them?”

“That’s some fine clothing you have there, missus. Purples and reds, right regal, if you ask me.”

Jacob would have tried the charm, but Evie reached into her purse. The woman accepted without gratitude, straightened her back after tucking the money away. The charity stung her worse than she dared let show. Hungry stomachs cannot get by on pride.

“Like I was saying, awful really. The woman was trying to avoid giving a share, turning tricks out of her home rather than working in the Blighters’ whorehouses, you see, but that’s against the rules for their girls. One day she opens this door and three men guts her right on her own floor. A kid, her kid, right there,” the woman jabbed her finger at the back corner of the room, “starts screaming. Neighbors say they ain’t never heard anything like it. Kid never even stopped, not even when they dragged him out of here by his ears.”

When neither Frye twin said anything, the woman wrapped up the story primly.

“But a bad history don’t a bad house make, so I’m going to make the best of it.”

“Of course,” Evie said. “Thank you for your time.”

“Come back anytime. Price for a story’ll have to go up if I have to start making them up though.”

“You’re a rare woman,” Jacob said. He tipped his hat to her. 

They walked in silence. The adrenaline coursing through his veins was sudden lightning. With Starrick dead, he had been staring at London through new, unfocused eyes. The Templars had been dethroned and yet the city still circled the drain. If he had not been a part of the Brotherhood, had not cut his teeth searching for the strings of the puppetmasters, he might have thought the city no better off at all. 

“I’m going to clean up Whitechapel while you’re gone,” he announced. “And take care of Jack.”

If he expected her to argue with him, she surprised him instead.

“I think if anyone can, it’s you.” 

  
  
  


Jacob rented a house for the first time in his life. He asked Agnes if she would consider coming along, keep house for him, keep him from losing his head, but she shot him down. There was something faintly disturbing about watching the old girl slide her hand over Bertha’s metal frame and wax poetic about the love of the open track. 

The little place had good solid walls, two little bedrooms, and reinforced doors and windows Jacob had to call in a favor to afford. 

At first, Jack said nothing unless he had to. He was around eight years old, unable to read, unable to write, and so often unwilling to speak that Jacob feared for his sanity. One cannot live in that kind of interminable silence forever. 

“What would you think about going to school?” Jacob asked one night as they sat down at the kitchen table. The sausages still sizzled on the platter. It was a cheap trick, but Jacob made no move for the serving fork. Jack waited, eyed the steaming dinner, and finally spoke.

“No.”

“You could learn some things. Make some friends. My father was a schoolmaster, so I’m speaking from experience here. It’s not a bad gig for a lad. Way better than sitting around here all the time.”

“You could teach me here.” 

Jacob grinned. “Would you like that?”

Jack shrugged.

“Because we could do that. Start going places. Start doing things. It’s only been two weeks, and I’m like to go insane myself just being in this house.”

Perhaps he had said the wrong thing, for Jack’s face crumpled, his eyes hardened.

“They said I was insane.”

The woman’s voice --  _ kid never stopped screaming _ \-- echoed in memory. 

“You survived a horrible tragedy,” Jacob said. “That makes you brave and strong. Not crazy.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Jacob had never had much control over his own blunt tongue. “Neither do I. There’s no words to help.” 

Perhaps he had said just the right thing this time. Jack agreed to start learning at home. They ate every sausage and every potato on the table. Jacob poured himself a glass of whiskey and added just a splash into Jack’s glass.

“Men often like to drink on a bargain. New times ahead, eh?” Jacob held out his glass, shook it a little to indicate what should be done. 

“Yes. New times,” Jack whispered. He clinked his glass against Jacob’s a little too hard.

  
  
  
  
  


Jacob wasn’t one to brag… wait, actually, yes, he was one to brag, and he did so often to Evie in those next few weeks. The Rooks loved little “Jack the Lad” as they dubbed him. Outside of the house, so did Jacob. 

Jack learned everything the first time, smarter than anyone could have imagined, soaking in all information and locking it up tight in his steel-trap mind and agile body. Jacob gave him an offhand pointer on using momentum to climb and looked up a few minutes later to the lad’s silhouette on the roof of the bank.

While still not talkative, Jack did speak frequently enough not to arouse any suspicion on their outings.

All in all, Jacob marked the first months as a sign of success and enjoyed sharing it with Evie. The conversations served to distract her from her single-minded focus on India, distracted him from the fact she was leaving incredibly soon. 

Tonight, in the living room of Henry’s flat, Jacob stretched out on the couch. It was one of the only pieces of furniture left.

“He has all of his letters down and can sound out nearly as many words in the paper as I can,” he said. 

“That’s nice,” Evie said, barely glancing up from the papers in her hands. 

“I tossed you a nice easy chance for a sarcastic comment because I know you’re tired, but you still couldn’t deliver.”

“What?” She turned to him now, and her freckled cheeks flushed pink. “I’m sorry. I should be listening. It’s just that I’m thinking about the Shroud.”

“Careful, sister. You might be flirting with obsession. The Shroud is safe.”

“Yes. Until its hiding place is discovered again. Won’t there always be another Starrick Crawford?”

“That’s cynical even for you. I understand your fears. There may always be another Crawford, and there’ll certainly never be another Jacob and Evie Frye...” His jest nudged a smile from her mouth but little else. “What’s really causing this sudden concern?”

She lifted up two slim rectangles from the papers and handed them over. He could tell they were tickets before reading the blocky print. When he did, he frowned up at her.

“That’s next week.”

“I know. We were able to get passage on a steamer sooner than expected.”

The trilling panic in his breast rose up again, the silly, selfish wish to beg her not to go, so he hid it behind a grin.

“Then we’d best celebrate. What do you say to a night on the town?”

“You know I don’t drink.”

“Who mentioned the devil’s water? I said  _ on _ the town.” He winked.

They climbed to one of their favorite spots -- the very pinnacle of Big Ben -- and talked for hours. 

Knowing she was leaving so soon, Jacob opted not to share with Evie the other side of life with young Jack, the crashing despondence of when the boy got home each night, his words and good cheer used up in his outside persona. 

Jacob kept his worries to himself.

**Author's Note:**

> This DLC was so good. It had such an interesting mix of answered and unanswered questions. Of course, I've taken some liberties here, but not many. The idea was so intriguing to me, Jacob "being like a father" (according to Evie) to Jack the Ripper. That's a path deserving of a story.
> 
> (I'm playing around with carrying this forward, putting together a couple of chapters, but for now, this is just a little possibility for how Jack ended up with Jacob.)


End file.
